


Back to the Start

by Unfeathered



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Gen, One Shot, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:48:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23511886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unfeathered/pseuds/Unfeathered
Summary: Once a year, every year, Jack revisits his past
Relationships: The Doctor/Jack Harkness, Twelfth Doctor/Jack Harkness
Comments: 4
Kudos: 47





	Back to the Start

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Drabble Challenge #71 // "Revisit" at [Who_Contest](https://who-contest.dreamwidth.org/), but not completed in time for it

Once a year, every year he revisits the site of the yard beside Limehouse Station in London. The area's all apartment blocks and their associated car parks nowadays, but he knows exactly where the spot is.

He hasn't always made it there on the exact anniversary, because at Torchwood things had a tendency to get in the way of planned appointments, but without fail, once every year he travels to the place where he first met the Doctor. The place where, on a freezing night in 1941, everything changed, where a nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord and a nineteen-year-old girl altered the trajectory of his life forever.

The place where he was shown who he could become, if he wanted it enough.

Nowadays, Torchwood doesn't get in the way of his visits because Torchwood is history too, he and Gwen (and Rhys, and Anwen) the only survivors, and he's taken to roaming the universe instead of sitting still in Cardiff. There's no need to monitor the Rift any more, since the explosion of the Hub to all intents and purposes forced it shut, and he can't bring himself to stay in a place haunted by so many personal ghosts. But wherever he is, he still comes back to Earth once a year to revisit the site where the Doctor and Rose saved him.

He stands staring at the car park that now covers the land beside the railway, voices echoing in his head.

_What's the matter, Captain? A bit close to the volcano for you?_

_Doctor, that bomb. We've got seconds._

_So it's volcano day. Do what you've got to do._

_Oh, come on. Give me a day like this. Give me this one._

_Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives._

He opens his eyes, because he's fairly certain that was a real voice, a soft Scottish voice overlapping with the memory in his head. (He doesn't actually have a memory of the Doctor saying that last bit here, because at that point he was light years away in a Chula ship with a bomb about to explode behind him, but he heard Rose – and, eventually, begrudgingly, the Doctor – retell the story so many times that he's always _felt_ like he was there.) And he realises that perhaps he's not the only one who might have reason to come back here from time to time. There's one other person who might need a reminder, occasionally, of one of those few times when everything went right, and that it can still happen again.

He turns to look at the man standing beside him – a man in a dark coat with wild, grey hair, a craggy, lived-in face, and eyebrows that could scare away an army.

He holds himself still, barely breathing, as if any movement might make the Doctor disappear before his eyes, like he did in the TARDIS all those years ago on the Game Station. But this Doctor turns and looks at him, and _smiles_ , with such a wealth of long-held affection in that smile that it makes his breath catch in the back of his throat.

"Hello, Jack."


End file.
